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Slack has literally been the virtual office room for many of us, be it the office banters or the uber important official communications. Slack has been one of the best team communicator I have come across, Hipchat is great too but it still needs to evolve. So here is how we usually communicate on Slack, in channels, DM and group DM’s. Slack has taken this a notch up and has introduced calling feature.

This feature had been in the pipeline for quite some time and the company was also beta testing the same from couple of months. So next time you think of buzzing your colleague and ask about the stuff just give him a ring. The calling feature will work on any version of the Slack app, be it the Windows, Mac desktop or even the web version of the Slack.

The call can be initiated either from the channel header or from the DM drop-down menu. Thankfully even if you use a free version of the Slack, you can still make one-on-one calls, however group calling feature is restricted to the paid version. This also means that one doesn’t need to use any other application or tool to call their colleagues.

Slack has introduced an Emoji feature that would let the participants select an emoji which would then be superimposed on their avatar. The emoji could be an approval for the conversation or any other signal the participant wants to give. Furthermore, one can also send meeting invite on Slack and reduce the dependency on other business meeting applications.

Slack has been trying to strengthen their offerings by fine tuning the features regularly. The calling feature is expected to boost the product and also help them get hold of the enterprise customers. Additionally, the company also wants to clearly demarcate between the paid and the free version and the group calling will help them get more paid customers on board.

Mahit Huilgol is a Mechanical Engineering graduate and is a Technology and Automobile aficionado. He ditched the Corporate boardroom wars in the favor for technology battle ground. Also a foodie by heart and loves both the edible chips and the non-edible silicon chips.